


the ascension

by snagov



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Dreams, Fix-It of Sorts, Love, M/M, Memory Loss, Quentin Coldwater Lives, canon compliant up through most of s4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:34:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27074299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: After a car accident, Eliot can remember very little of his life. But he remembers quite a few of his dreams.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 36
Kudos: 79





	the ascension

**Author's Note:**

> This is canon divergent as of the last episode of season 4. In ridding the world of the monster, Quentin lives. Eliot is lost.

_"I had all and then most of you_  
_Some and now none of you_  
_Take me back to the night we met_  
_I don't know what I'm supposed to do_  
_Haunted by the ghost of you_  
_Oh, take me back to the night we met"  
_\- Lord Huron, The Night We Met

* * *

_August_

He often dreams of the Chelsea Hotel. A bland redbrick building hunched over 23rd Street, the Chelsea Hotel is an institution. And no longer open to the public. Eliot comes here when something strange and wild curls up in his belly, standing before it on the edge of the sidewalk, staring up into the dark windows and cast-iron railings. Which window was Patti Smith’s and Robert Mapplethorpe’s? Which was Leonard Cohen’s? Which window pointed the way toward room 110, where Nancy Spungen had bled out while Sid slept? Which one marked Bob Dylan’s room? Which one might be his own? There had been a time once, where to be an artist in New York City, you had to come to the Chelsea Hotel. Eliot had wanted to be an artist. He had no idea if the spark was in him, if there was anything worth saying. But he wanted to try. 

Tom Wolfe had said it once and best: “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as five years.” He flicks his ash on the pavement, quirking one eye up at the lonely sign of the Chelsea, wondering which room Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen had fucked in. Which room Allen Ginsberg had haunted. Which room had heard the slow-coming deathrattle of Dylan Thomas’ last months, going gently into that good night. Eliot stares upward, dark curls catching in a slight breeze, his unshaven jaw firmly set. The Chelsea Hotel had been Eliot’s first stop when he’d arrived in New York. It’s not far from Penn Station, an easy walk down Seventh Ave. Eliot is used to Chicago, the press of bodies and skyscrapers holding up the clouds like tentpoles. Still, it seemed faster somehow. Larger. It had been September. That early autumn of September when the sky is impossibly blue and the late afternoon sun shines golden on steel and glass. He’d arrived on a Friday with little to his name but boots and a backpack; only the pigeons seemed to notice. When Elvis bought Graceland in March 1957, he knew it was where the Garden of Eden had originally been located. The experts, archaeologists and religious scholars, all disagreed. Certainly, according to intellectual review, according to science and fact, Eden (if it had ever existed at all), had been somewhere in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, nestled within the watery arms of those mother rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Not Elvis, he knew things in his bones, he had known Paradise is in Memphis, Tennessee, somewhere in the cradle of the Civil War. He’d bought that piece of Eden for $102,500. He’d died there later, in August 1977, still in Eden. Eliot knows things in his bones. They were all wrong. Graceland, the Promised Land, is somewhere in New York City.

It is a forty-minute subway ride back to his apartment; Eliot slumps on the plastic blue bench of the L train, leaning his head against a poster printed with one hopeful poem or another. There’s a pack of American Spirits in one pocket and a lighter in another. He watches someone clip their fingernails at the far end. When it stops at Bedford Avenue Station, he’s already waiting at the door, his bored face staring at the glass and his reflection looking back. 

He’s not certain where the years have gone. He’s twenty-four now; twenty-four with a degree gathering dust and the months slipping through his fingers. He tells himself that he’ll apply to graduate school soon. The next semester, he thinks. (It has been _the next semester_ for two years.) To pay rent, he’d taken a job at a bakery nearby. At first, he’d worked the counter, but as time has gone, he’d grown interested in the ins and outs of flour and sugar, butter and salt. Now, every morning at three a.m., he finds himself unlocking the door to the bakery and tying a white apron on, knotting it at his thin waist. There’s a rhythm to the morning. Pick your station, pick your song. He feeds the starters to _Ziggy Stardust._ There are boules and baguettes to shape, croissants to laminate. He cuts a case of kiwis and strawberries for fruit tarts, a delicate balance of a pâté sucrée crust with a vanilla pastry cream filling. The fruit, carefully arranged on top, is glazed with an apricot nappage to make it shine. When the shipment comes, he and the other bakers stock the dry storage and tuck the butter in the walk-in. He hauls the fifty-pound bags of King Arthur flour over, refilling the tubs. He’s whiplash-thin, yes, but strong. Any baker worth their salt must be strong. 

The city drones on out there, past the open sash of his window. It was there before him and will continue on after. He might go out now, find a diner, a coffeeshop, a bar. Somewhere to kill the time. There’s a cocktail bar in the East Village that he has loved, he might drape himself over a stool and wrap his arms around a body for a night. Scotch and mezcal smoky in his mouth. Eliot is a wreck is a ruin is a monster. He splashes water on his face and it drips from his nose to his chin to his feet. What makes a monster? At the end of the world, Frankenstein’s creature had drifted off into the Arctic ice, wanting to be left in peace. Geryon himself had only hoped to tend to his flocks. And Grendel, sick Grendel, well, he had only been born with an address in the gutter and a stomach he could never hope to fill. That was the most monstrous thing of any creature, to want. 

To want is to believe you deserve. How dare any of us assume such a thing?

What do we beg from love but a magic potion? Please, see me differently. Please, make me palatable. We know none of us go down easily, we beg love to season us. To sweeten the pot. We ache for a love like Tristan and Iseult’s wine, binding and unbreakable. With enough love, we think, we cannot be thrown away. 

_Don’t forget me._

_Don’t you dare leave me here alone._

He eats leftover pad thai from the takeout container and reads about shipwrecks and lost things. The _Edmund Fitzgerald_ at the bottom of Lake Superior, the _Titanic_ , queen of the Atlantic’s graveyards. The twinned loss of HMS _Terror_ and HMS _Erebus_ in Nunavut and the long death march of the doomed expedition seeking to be found. He falls asleep with the light on and the book open on his chest, dreaming of shale-colored tents beneath a pale sky and bones bleaching on the ice. 

His roommate takes the book from his hands and sets it on his nightstand, brushing his hair back with a careful hand. “Oh, El,” she whispers, frowning. 

On the kitchen counter, a wooden bowl overflows with peaches and plums.

* * *

He is dreaming. Somewhere past his well-shut eyelids, he is in a wide room with a travertine floor. Someone offers him a chalice on a silver salver and when Eliot drinks, the wine is thick and red on his tongue. It is summer. Through the windows, he can see a lazy golden sunlight and hear wind in the leaves. What is he wearing? Robes? Silk and velvet. On his head is a crown. Is he a king? A prince? Someone takes his hand and holds it over her swollen belly, like a wife to her husband. The child kicks. 

A dream, yes. It’s only a dream. A figment of the mind. Picture a clearing in a forest. Picture the bright sun above and a wooden cabin with the front door standing wide open. Picture hundreds of multicolored tiles strewn beneath you, like confetti in the grass. And you are splayed out open to the sky, with your back arched and someone is knocking at your heart, asking to come in. What does he look like, the lover kissing you? The lover within you? Tell me what the dream looks like, his hair grown now from dark to grey. Tell me what you dream of, the temperature of his skin and the sound of his voice. 

Eliot, what have you forgotten? Eliot, what do you remember?

(Everything is already there within you. Keep looking.) 

* * *

Eliot wakes, shaking. He lights a cigarette and the ash falls in the bed. 

Have you ever tried to hold onto a dream? It’s impossible. An impossible thing.

* * *

Once upon a time, Eliot had loved. Only a faint memory now. A distant impression like a shadow at the door, light dappled over a field. 

“What was he like?” His roommate, Margo, asks. She’s tipped her head back over the back of the couch, her dark hair streaming out like blood. Eliot lets the wineglass dangle from his fingertips and stares into his own reflection in the dark window. Reach back, further back. There is the phantom of an accident, a car crash spinning out on black ice. Everything moves with glacial slowness. An emergency in slow motion. Hear a scream and then silence. Something red. Blood, perhaps. There had been someone in the passenger seat and Eliot’s heart throbs when he thinks of the dark shape slumped over the dashboard, shattered snowflakes of glass in long dark hair. When he tries to reach for his face, his name, anything at all - the memory recedes again like water at ebbtide. _Who were you? What did you look like? Who were you to me?_

It’s impossible to say.

“I can’t remember.”

“There’s gotta be a name from the accident. _Someone_ must know.”

“No,” Eliot sighs. “I’ve looked. Believe me, I’ve looked. Just _John Doe._ No one has any idea.” He drinks and the wine is thick and tannic on his tongue. “Like he’s disappeared into thin air.” 

“You should get out of here for a while.”

Eliot laughs. Dry. Bitter. “Yeah. Sure, Bambi. And go where?”

“My family’s got a small cabin, out on Long Island. You could stay there.”

“And do what exactly?"

Margo shrugs. “Breathe. Sleep. Jerk off, I don’t know. Just break it up for a while.”

He digs his teeth into his lower lip and drinks until the wine sloshes in his belly and the room spins. If he drinks enough, he doesn’t have to remember. If he drinks enough, he can be anyone other than this. Each pill, a vacation from himself. Sometimes, he wonders about the body’s willfulness. The brain gives up but the body will not relinquish life so easily. We might lie in bed, unmoving and unspeaking, allowing no food nor water to pass our lips. But the body will take itself apart, feed on its own flesh, drive you mad for the slightest bit of rain to lick from the gutter. The heart keeps going. 

_No,_ you say, as if you have ever had a say with your own body; the heart sings out, still preferring this world to the next. _Yes,_ it cries. _Yes yes yes._

_Yes._

* * *

A philosopher once said that words mean nothing on their own. We want to believe that there is something behind them, something core and true, that we might signify with our clumsy letters and awkward syllables. Words only mean something when they are defined by other words. By what they are not. By what they almost are. Love: a strong affection. Love, which is the opposite of hate. Love, which is not indifference. Love, which might mean something else to you. 

* * *

He has made sixty plum tarts. The temperature gauge on the walk-in is broken. His Sharpie is missing. He has frosting in his hair and a burn on his index finger and desperately wants to drink anything other than water out of a plastic quart container hastily shoved under the prep table. At the end of another very long day, Eliot peels his whites off and shucks them in the laundry pile, throwing his bag over his shoulder and tucking a cigarette behind one ear. 

When he goes to the register to clock out at just past noon, Eliot is covered with sweat and flour, rancid butter beneath his nails and confectioner’s sugar on his shoes. He can feel heavy eyes on him and looks up to find the same man who always sits in the same corner. He’s a pretty one at least, Eliot thinks, caught on the man’s long dark hair and his careful eyes. He offers a quick, self-conscious smile to Eliot, quirking one side of his mouth.

“Hey,” the boy says. He’s as beautiful as a bonfire. “I’m Quentin. Quentin Coldwater.”

Eliot looks him up and down, keeping his tongue in line. His mouth is dry. “That’s a weird name, Sodapop.”

Quentin, to his credit, only flushes a little. This dance feels strange, like a memory from a dream. Like they’ve done this before. 

Perhaps, in another world, they had.

* * *

_September_

“Eliot?” Quentin asks, walking alongside him in Central Park. The sky is bright above Belvedere Castle; reflections of fat, pleased clouds and chattering ducks glide along the surface of Turtle Pond. They both have their hands shoved in their pockets, not entirely certain where to put them if left unattended. A few trees have begun to turn, the tips of the elms and oaks fading to a pale gold. 

“Hmm?” He kicks a pebble. 

“Where are you from?” 

“Indiana. Shitfuck of a town called Whiteland. Worked our way up to an entire two stoplights before I got the hell out of there.” Eliot sighs. “It was quite an achievement .”

Whiteland, Indiana, where he had been born and raised. Until he left, age eighteen, he had never gone far past its borders. His mother had taken him up north sometimes, where the woods and the water are wild and the wolverines still roam. He’d gone fly fishing once, though he’d spent the remainder of the week indoors, reading _The Vampire Lestat._ Little adventures. Too little, too late. He had ached to explore. To go everywhere, to know the sand on distant beaches, to know salt flats and mountains, tundras and deserts. Let me inherit the earth. There is so much more to the world than Whiteland and its myriad of churches. Go past the reformed church on the hill, past the stained glass windows. Past the Shell station on the corner, selling Cokes at two for three dollars. Fill up your tank. Keep going.

“My parents,” Eliot says slowly, wondering why he’s still talking at all. “Were farmers.” 

Quentin blinks. His words are slow and steady, as if he were picking them out carefully like a lobster from a tank. “You’re not serious.” 

_I am. They’re farmers still, last I heard. Don’t ask me about my 4H pig, the one I loved and hugged. Don’t ask about how they slit his throat and served him to me on a paper plate. Don’t ask me about my cousins in their evangelical church, coloring in the blood of Jesus Christ with red crayon. Don’t ask me about my father’s military medals kept in the polished wooden box in the dining room. Don’t ask about the Army recruiter he brought home when I turned eighteen; how I came home to find them at the dining room table, clicking a ballpoint pen._

“God, I dearly, _dearly_ wish I wasn’t.”

Quentin looks over. “Do you ever talk to them?”

Eliot shrugs. His father had always found fault, looking with a critical eye over his son’s shoulder blades, his too-sharp chin. His hair, the way he spoke. When he had fallen slack with seizures as a child, his father had found blame with those too. He’d started bleeding out then, there from this first wound. His father pushing him away, this primal rejection. The knife had twisted in his gut and never come out. Abandonment is like a bullet lodged in the base of the spine. It never comes out, we simply grow around it, cover it up with flesh and skin, hair and bone. It stays with us, carried from place to place, a parcel of ache. We might live forever with it, caught up by sturdy sinew, this isolated bit of lead. Or the shrapnel might break off, travel deeper still. Might kill us in the night. He’s bleeding still; luckily, this sort of blood doesn’t stain. 

“Do you ever see something and it just - reminds you of how much is out there? All the history. The past, the future. Other worlds? Like this,” Quentin says, holding up the bottle. “How long has this been in the water? Who threw it? Who made it? Who will find it after us and ask the same questions? What if it’s not from our world at all but thrown through the dimensions with a message?”

Eliot looks at him with wide, bewildered eyes, nearly choking on his wonder. Quentin is breathing hard, half-laughing at his own statement. His eyes are bright and god, Eliot wants to kiss him. To pull him close, one hand at the back of his neck, pressing into his mouth. “You’re baked.”

“Maybe,” Quentin laughs. “But seriously."

“This world’s enough trouble.”

“El, even - “ Quentin hesitates. Eliot frowns. “Even the Fillory books? You never wanted to find Fillory? You never - opened up a clock or closet or something and reached in?”

“Come on, Q.”

“I did.”

“Of course _you_ did.” 

“Shut up, El,” Quentin laughs, swatting at Eliot’s shoulder. His touch is warm. 

“Alright, yeah,” Eliot admits, tipping his head back to the sky. “I fucking loved those books. Doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter, Eliot.”

“It’s just a kids’ series.”

Quentin stares at him. Eliot buys time with his cigarette between his lips, inhaling deep. “That’s the power of books,” Quentin says. “Doesn’t matter when you read them or if the author is dead. It’s like … time travel. Do you believe in magic?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Magic. Casting spells, telekinesis. Other worlds. Do you think it’s real?”

Eliot frowns. A sharp ache penetrates his skull. He winces, dropping his coffee cup. It splashes over the path and his pant leg alike.

“Oh god. Shit,” Quentin says, kneeling. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Just a - “ He winces. “ Sudden migraine.”

“Do you get those often?”

 _Yes._ “Sometimes,” Eliot admits quietly. Quentin looks up at him, hair blowing across his face and wearing worry upon his brow like a crown. 

Like a crown. Strange thought that.

* * *

Do you dream of another world? Somewhere else? Somewhere anywhere but here?

Eliot has always had vivid dreams. Once, he dreamt of another world. The first world, the one his grandmother painted for him in between the words of her Bible. In the Beginning, there was a garden. In the Beginning, there was promise and it was always warm and fruit grew from the trees. When Eliot left home, the garden gate shut behind him, the lock half-rusted. It had been September, years ago. He remembers the wheat fields had been thick and blowing in the early autumn breeze. The patch of corn was being cut down with a combine. In the distance, there were only silos and trees to break the endless sky. 

As a child, Eliot had always wanted to explore. To strike out and discover. Whiteland had choked him, chafed him. All he had wanted to do was breathe. What explorer hasn’t left home without thinking their town was too small, their name was too small, their destiny too small? They stretched out, arms and eyes open to the world, saying _this this this is all mine._ (Do we explore because our lives are too small? Too claustrophobic, boxed in here in with these paltry city blocks and shopping malls. Do we explore because we must? Because we wake up in our beds with the realization of otherness, of monstrosity? We begin to learn our hearts, the flow of our blood, how it is not like the others in the town. Different and inverted and wrong. So, in our shame, our deep guilt of getting this most basic of things wrong, we must cast out to other towns, other lands. Try on other cities like clothing.)

Exploration is a strange desire. If we are careful, logical, prudent, then we would stay in spaces that are known. In _out there,_ there are dangers that we’ve never considered. Think of the astronaut slowly running out of air. Think of Mount Everest, with corpses used as wayfinders, failed explorers saying keep on, don’t sleep or you’ll die. Think of ships marooned for weeks on still waters, the sea stretching out for miles in every direction, identical and aching, no way to fumble back to shore.

Whiteland was a miserable place and his parents’ farm was perched at the far end, isolated and desolate. Like anywhere in the Midwest, it’s a scorching oven in the summer and a frigid tundra in the winter. In the mornings, a chill comes out of the fog and settles deep within the bones. A long, twisted river snakes through the town, the water slow and thick with sludge. No one touches the river, blaming Gary under their breath. Lake Michigan, to the north, is one of the largest lakes in the world. A glacier had torn it deep into the earth during the last ice age. It is still almost preternaturally cold, as if the ice was still in there, deep at the bottom. Waiting. Once upon a time in Whiteland. In many ways, he’s never left. A soldier’s child, a farmer’s child, reared on canned soup and tinned tuna. It is a gutwrench to be born poor as dirt, a disgraceful stain he’s never been able to vomit up, no matter how far he sticks his too-short fingers down his throat. He cannot pick it out from between his teeth. No matter how he twists and turns and holds himself, he’s never at ease. He stands wrong, holds his arms wrong. His clothes are always wrong: wrong color, wrong fabric, wrong fit. His voice, no matter what he does, always eventually slips back into the rough nasal tones of the Midwest. 

His parents went to church regularly. Sang psalms on Sundays and watched football after. “That’s not my religion,” Eliot had said to his father.

“Well, what kind of religion are you?”

“I’m a survivalist.”

Survive this. He ached for so much more than Whiteland. Hungry and skinny, seventeen-years-old and waiting wanting hoping for his life to start. The August winds had blown hot and threatening. All of Whiteland ached for something they couldn’t name. Violent and hot. They cluttered under windows, as dangerous as birds on a wire in a tornado. Take a walk through the air Eliot breathed. The soft brown Berber carpet, the television set the size of Alaska. The curtains match the upholstery in a careful way. His parents had gone to Whiteland High, had graduated 1977, high school sweethearts. (They must have once had their own passions once, their own fascinations, their own Quentin Coldwaters.) The television never shut off and they ate barbecued chicken from the grill without knives and forks, the sauce dripping down their hands, sucking it off from their fingers.

Eliot keeps his eyes in books, in other worlds. Creatures in rock pools. Distant kingdoms. Out among the stars. Other worlds. What other worlds? Eliot has lived in two places: Indiana and New York. It’s impossible to imagine a place where the air is always warm and fruit grows from the trees. It’s impossible to imagine a place where the snowslush isn’t grey along the edges of the road and nothing leaves you out in the cold. Impossible to imagine. 

His head aches. It always does when he thinks too much.

Especially when he tries to remember a dream.

* * *

“Margo?” Eliot calls out from laying on his bed, hands crossed over his chest and staring at the ceiling. The crown molding is coated in a fine layer of dust that he’s never noticed before. “Do you think memories get locked in your head? Like - if they were there, just sort of stopped up, like a champagne cork in your brain - do you think you can remember them?”

Margo brings him a glass of water and brushes his hair back. “You’re drunk. Drink some water.” 

He does. “Seriously though.” 

She shrugs. “Maybe try writing what you remember? See where that gets you.”

* * *

He is tired of writing. He’s been trying for hours, tearing at his dark curls. The pen shakes in his hand. Why is there this feeling of having a bomb for a heart? Hear the isochronal ticking, edging toward the end of everything. If he stops writing, what will he be left with? Only the sound of time running out.

Stop all the clocks. (Don’t leave me here alone.)

_Neglect. I have forgotten how you taste. How you smell. I can see pale green things (eyes, your eyes) in my memory but the specifics are missing. Caricatures. Generalizations. The water is cold, murky. The color of your hair, dark as spiders’ legs. Lake moss. Pale like alewives’ bellies. I attached to you. Zebra mussel to the hull of a ship. Ballast. Poisoned. Infected. Let me start. I want to rebuild you, atom by atom. I will thread atoms to molecules, molecules to cells. Lay the structure of your bonework, your nervous system, capillaries, your sinew and musculature. Flesh, teeth, bile. I want to know you like a recipe. One part hair, three parts strong thighs. Sea anemone, smelling of salt air. Let me write you a love poem. I want to make love to you the way a virus does. Crawl into you, singular, unnoticed, unobstructed. I will enter your pores, your cells, lick your DNA and imprint myself upon. Replicate until I am filling you and full of you. One body, indivisible by god._

_How can I give myself to someone else? I was whole, but you pressed your fingers into my skin and it did not bounce back. How can I show myself when I still have your indentation on my shoulders, waist, wrists? When your breath is still on my breath? When I still find your hair growing from my scalp?_

_Who were you? What was your name? How can I have forgotten who you were?_

* * *

_October_

“Have you ever loved someone and lost them?”

Quentin pokes the bonfire. He doesn’t look over. “Yes,” he says after a long pause. “I have.” 

Eliot nods. He should say something. Anything. But Quentin has a strange look on his face, absent and aching. Strands of his dark hair have fallen from where they were tied back, now loose across his face. Eliot wants to reach out and brush them back. He wants to feel them against the pads of his fingers, against his wanting hands. (Why does it feel like he half-remembers them? Is his want so wide that it is inventing memory?)

“I’m sorry,” he finally manages.

“It was a long time ago,” Quentin says. 

“What was she like?” There’s a picture, an image of Iseult on the ship. Her pale hair caught and torn in the wind. Quentin would be a beautiful Tristan. Look at his fingers, careful and perfectly adept, where they twitch against the neck of the bottle. He would hold the wineglass just like this, drinking deeply. (He would hold your face just like this, drinking deeply.)

Quentin stares at the fire. It paints the planes of his face in bright orange-red. “He made me laugh.” 

Eliot chokes. Quentin smirks at him, sidelong. “Sorry, I didn’t - “

“I know.”

“Usually I get a read on these things.”

Quentin grins at him sidelong. “I’m always here to surprise you.” He pauses and glances over. “Have you? Lost someone, I mean?”

The fire spits and bathes them in orange. Like peaches. Quentin’s mouth is stained dark by the wine. Like plums. Eliot feels sweat drip down his spine. 

“Yes. I don’t - remember much. It’s ancient history.”

“I’m sorry.”

Eliot shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.” He doesn’t think Quentin believes him. “I have this weird dream,” Eliot murmurs. “Sometimes.”

Quentin looks over, tilting his head. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” Eliot drawls, closing his eyes and drifting off into another lifetime. “There was a house. A child. I think we grew old together.”

That dream comes to him regularly; it tastes like plums.

* * *

Love never stays.

It is raining. The subway is packed with shopping bags and wet umbrellas, tired women and children fussing in strollers. One boy holds his finger a centimeter away from his sister. _“I’m not touching you,”_ he says. The girl cries for her mother. _“Make him stop.”_

Is this what he wants? This quotidian love affair, to come home by six p.m. every evening, volleying the same questions back and forth? _What do you want for dinner? Did you go to the store? Can you get the mail? Turn the light off when you go to bed, will you?_ Is this the game he wants to play? Can love last in real life? Can love survive junk mail and circulars? Can love survive a dirty bathroom floor and piles of laundry? Can love survive or will we find ourselves in a year or two looking over the fence for greener things?

The trouble is that you want to know about love. The trouble is that you want to know about magic. The trouble is that you beg _tell me the truth_ and that we assume there is a truth to tell. Love is a wide word and my love might be pale or dark, the word love itself tells us nothing. Instead, we must wall in around the word with descriptions and limitations. _I love you deeply,_ I might say. _I’m half in love with you,_ you might say. Do you mean what I mean when we speak the word love? Language is as slippery as an eel and just as ready to bite. Language is like teaching colors to the born-blind. How do I know that the concept you hold as love is the same as my own? Is there a pure definition of love, transcendent of experience, that we all might derive meaning and explanation? Or is it instead simply what we have cobbled together of our own experiences and desires; my love is a carmine and yours a scarlet. Similar perhaps, but never quite right.

In a previous version of this story, crossed out, I told you how Eliot had come to love once. How Eliot, drawn and dark-eyed, with cheeks too thin and spindly fingers, had learned that love is a splinter the body heals around. In a previous version of this story, I betrayed him still more. Remember him as a boy, looking hopefully toward the bright sky, the setting sun, that horizon that might be his own, if he could only stretch his fingers far enough. Eliot wore clothes someone had already worn, went to a church his grandmother loved, followed all the rules. Somewhere out there, there is an unwritten land where nothing is asked of him. 

He wonders about love. True love. Does it exist? It’s easy to think about, out and alone on the water, where the night darkens both sky and water so deep, you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. To believe there is a great love waiting for you promises there is someone on the other side. Love sits like a weight at the edge of the world, drawing everything toward it. Eliot feels himself drawn, though he doesn’t know where it leads. He may not know the name of this true love, but he can feel them out there, shaping the curves of his life. _I wonder if we have met over and over and over again. How many lives have I found you? How many have I missed?_

He pauses, one hand stretched out. Why does it ache, possession? Why does it hurt, holding everything you want in your own arms? Here it is, this love, heavy in your arms, and all you can think of is how it will feel when it’s gone again. What life is this? He is living on stolen moments, on little pieces of promises, inching toward a someday that might never come. Someday, it will be safe again. Someday, it will be quiet. Someday, it will no longer be interesting times. He packs all of his hopes into _someday,_ waiting for the right moment to live again.

* * *

Do you believe in another world? Do you believe in magic? Tell me where you’re going.

Tell me what you’re running toward.

* * *

_November_

Eliot takes the long way home from the subway stop, kicking at the yellow leaves as he goes. A cigarette in his mouth and smoke adding to the clouds in the autumn sky. At the apartment, there are already voices talking. He opens the door to find Margo and Quentin and several others he’s never met. Half-familiar characters, like a memory from a dream. An irritable-looking tall man leaning against a wall. A nervous blond. 

“El,” Quentin says, shifting from hip to hip. “This is Julia.” 

“Oh, hi,” Eliot says. He furrows a brow and turns toward his sidebar, not sure what else to do with his hands. He hadn’t expected anyone tonight. “Gin or bourbon? Pick your poison.”

Julia smiles. She has a soft smile and long, dark hair. Eliot can imagine that the two of them would look beautiful when they kissed. “Bourbon.”

“Fantastic. Q, your girlfriend has better taste than you.”

“Oh,” Julia laughs. “Q and I aren’t ….together.”

“Oh God,” Quentin shakes his head. His own drink held tightly between his thighs. “No, we’re just friends. Best friends.”

“I’ve known Q since we were twelve.” 

Quentin’s cheekbones are flushed and Eliot feels the same warmth creep over him as he holds Quentin’s gaze. Somehow, he’s certain the blush has nothing to do with embarrassment. 

“So, what’s the party for?” He asks. 

It’s Margo who answers first. “El, honey, sit down. We have something to talk to you about.”

“Oh, God, is this an intervention?”

“No,” Julia says. “Well, not exactly.”

“He needs one,” pipes up the scowling man in the back, leaning against a wall. 

Margo glances back. “Hey, pipe down in the peanut gallery, okay?” 

Quentin fishes something out from his pocket and hands it to Eliot. Eliot turns it over in his hands, letting the pendant dangle from his long fingers. “Put this on,” Quentin says. 

“And _why_ exactly am I wearing this gift shop special?”

“It's for the headaches. Just trust me, El,” Quentin asks. So Eliot does and slips it over his head. 

“Alright, what’s going on?”

“Do you remember when I asked you if you believed in magic?”

Eliot nods, bewildered. Quentin holds out a hand and suddenly a small thunderstorm is conjured right in his palm. 

“Fuck. How the fuck did you do that?”

“It’s magic,” Margo says, leaning over. “Q’s a magician. I’m a magician. And Julia, Penny, Alice, everyone here.”

Eliot blinks. “Christ.” 

“So are you.” 

“Right,” Eliot says, disbelief coloring his face. “So is this the part where you take me to Hogwarts in your flying car or does that come later?”

“I’m serious. Eliot, this isn’t your life.”

Eliot stares and shakes his head. "I need a cigarette," he mutters.   
  
And walks away.

* * *

“Hey,” Quentin says, crawling out on the fire escape. Eliot has more smoke in his mouth than air and a cigarette rapidly turning into ash.

“Hey.”

“Came to see how you were holding up.”

“Considering I’ve just been informed that this entire existence is a lie and I’m actually a magician who’s died multiple times in various and creative ways? 

Quentin tucks his hair behind his ear and offers a small smile. “Um, yeah. Considering that.”

“It’s a lot to take in.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Quentin shifts, biting the inside of his cheek. “I meant to tell you, well - you should know. Um -"

"Spit it out, Q."

"I know the name of the man in the car, El.”

Eliot goes very still. “I never told you about that. Can you read my mind or -“

“No,” Quentin says. “Well, Penny can, I guess, but that’s not what - “ He sighs. “No one read your mind.”

“He was in the other timelines wasn’t he?” Eliot asks. His voice is very quiet. “The man in the car.”

“Yes.”

“He and I were - we were- “

“In some of them, yes. Some of the timelines were - er, shorter than the others.” Quentin looks sheepish.

“Christ.” Eliot shakes his head and drinks his wine. “Did I love him?” _Like I think I did?_

“Yes.”

“And did he - “ _Like I hope he did?_

“God, yes,” Quentin breathes. 

And that’s that. Eliot nods, inhaling unsteadily. “Alright. Let’s get this over with.”

“Are you sure?”

Eliot swallows, glancing down to the street below, then up to Quentin’s worried eyes. His hair looks soft. The wind has tangled it around his neck and collar. Eliot imagines running his hand along it, tucking the lock behind Quentin’s ear. Kissing him there, at the temple. 

“Never been more sure in my life.” (Which is not true.) 

“El,” Quentin says. “If you don’t want to, you don’t - “

“I want to,” Eliot says, holding his gaze. (Which is true.) 

* * *

“Fine,” he says. “Do it. Give them back.”

“It’s - “

“It’s what? It’s simple. It’s my _life_.” 

“What Alice means,” Margo says. “Is that it’s complicated.”

“There was - there was a time loop.”

“And?”

“The way this works, you’ll have all your memories," Julia says. Her expression is kind. "Not just from this timeline, but from all of them.”

“… How many timelines are we talking exactly?”

“You’ve lived forty times, Eliot.”

Eliot stares at him. “Well then, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.”

“You have to choose,” Margo says. “We can’t decide for you.”

“How many of you - “ 

Quentin shifts awkwardly. “It took us a while to find you.”

Eliot nods. “Right.”

“El, I started looking the moment I could. I don’t - I don’t know what repercussions there will be. I used ten Tesla Flexions to find you.”

“Tesla Flexion?” 

Julia clears her throat. “It’s a spell that allows us to speak to someone in another timeline.”

“Christ.” Eliot shakes his head. “I’ll understand all this then? If it works.”

Quentin nods. 

“Well, I’m not getting younger, let’s go.”

There in a circle, surrounded by candles and crow feathers, Quentin reaches out. “Hold my hand. At the count of three, close your eyes.” Eliot nods. There’s a slow chant, an unearthly wind. The count: One, two, three. He closes his eyes and it’s dark. 

How dark?

As dark as what Jonah saw, inside of the whale

* * *

On the dark mountain, there is a garden. No one knows who made it, no one knows where it came from. It ranges for miles, carved out of rosebushes and crumbling stone walls. The young king blinks, staring at a patch of verdant leaves and thick grass. The sun is shining brightly and the air is thick and beautiful, smelling of honeysuckle and lavender. In the distance, there is an apple tree. To get from here, there is a series of passages. From where he stands, looking blankly toward the end, he can see that one might go right or left. Once, some years ago, the king had had a long discussion with his labyrinth-architect, who told him that in lieu of a red string to mark your progress in a labyrinth, one might instead try always turning left. Should you do so, you might begin to eliminate the false starts and come to see the eventual correct path. 

So the king climbs the dark mountain. At the first juncture, set in ivy and marked by broken faience statues, he goes left. At the end of the path, there is a page from a book. 

_One._

_There you are, Quentin Coldwater. Eliot lays sprawled in front of Brakebills University, watching the wide-eyed boy walk up to him, fidgeting with his hands and the bag on his shoulder._

_“Quentin Coldwater?” Eliot asks incredulously, raising a brow._

_“Um,” the boy fidgets. Stutters. “Um, yeah.”_

_**“** I'm Eliot. You're late. Follow me.” _

_**“** Uh, okay. Um, hey - Di--Where am I?” _

_“Upstate New York.”_

_“Upstate, but I was just-- Hey. Okay, what--what is this place?” So many questions, Eliot thinks. But at least he's cute._

_“Brakebills University. You've been offered a preliminary exam for entry into the graduate program.”_

_“Am I hallucinating?”_

_“If you were," Eliot drawls. "How would asking me help? Come on, or you'll miss it.”_

(Another path, another page.)

_Seven._

_“Q,” Eliot hisses, his hand stretched across a concrete floor. “Q, if we don’t - “_

_“It’s okay. It is,” Quentin says, crouched beneath an overturned desk. A shadow passes over, moth-shaped._

_“Q, if we don’t - you must know.”_

_Quentin squeezes Eliot’s hand. “I know.”_

(Another path, another page.)

_Fifteen._

_He is on the edge of a shore, four crowns before him. It feels like a memory from a dream._

_“Kneel Eliot Waugh," Quentin says, holding a crown in his wide hands. Eliot smirks, drawing an exasperated look to Quentin's face. "Would you just do it? It's gonna be quick, I promise. So destiny is-it's bullshit. But you are High King in your blood. And somehow that makes sense, you know? And I-I just-for what it's worth, I think that you are going to be a really good king. Um, so, um, I-I dub thee, um, I don't know. Would you say, like you're more brave or merciful?”_

_He looks so beautiful when he's self-conscious, Eliot thinks. It's not the first time he's thought this._ _“I'd say I'm neither. But I still plan to be a spectacular monarch.”_

_Quentin smiles and the world is bright. “I hereby dub thee...High King Eliot, the Spectacular.”_

(Again.)

_Twenty-four._

_“What was that for?” Eliot asks, pressing his hand to his just-kissed mouth. Quentin is still staring at his lips, his eyes like wicks in the firelight. (What had Sappho said? That’s right. You burn me. )_

_“I don’t know,” Quentin murmurs. And isn’t that just like Q?_

(Again and again.)

_Thirty-two._

_Two men sit on a dais in a throne room, holding a basket of fruit between them. Eliot holds a plum in his hand. It's on the very peak of ripeness, soft and tender beneath the dark purple skin, easily bruised if he pushes too hard. If he were to bring it to his mouth and bite, juice would run down his chin. It would taste sweet. He doesn't need to taste it to know that it would be sweet. Next to him, Quentin sits, shaking his head, his shoulders moving beneath the fabric of his shirt. Eliot can watch the muscles in his neck work as he swallows, watch his irises dart back and forth, trying to make sense of the truth. A lifetime lived together, a life unlived._

_“I know this sounds dumb," Quentin begins, half-uneasily. His breath is rushed. "But us… we… I don’t know, think about it, we… we work. We know it, because we lived it. Who gets that kind of proof of concept?”_

_Eliot inhales.“We were just injected with a half-century of emotion, so I get that maybe you’re not thinking clearly.”_

_“No," Quentin disagrees, shaking his head. "I’m just saying, what if we gave it a shot? Would that be that crazy? Why the fuck not?”_

_“I know you and you… aren’t…”_

_“It doesn’t matter.”_

_“Don’t be naïve, it matters." Eliot swallows, tightening his grip around the plum as he resolves himself. Feel this, how it bruises in the palm of his hand. "Q, come on, I love you, but you have to know that that’s not me and that’s definitely not you. Not when… not when we have a choice.”_

_“Okay… I… okay. Sorry… I…”_

(To the right this time, another path surrounded by aspen and elms. A page abandoned on gravel.)

_Thirty-nine._

  
_“Q. It's me. It's Eliot.” He holds his arms wide. Where is this? A playground? What is he wearing? He doesn't know. For once, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how Quentin is looking at him, with bruised eyes and a wide net of lines across his face. Exhaustion. Ache. Grief. Guilt. Eliot knows all these and more._

_“Okay, no games. Let's just go," Quentin says, gesturing for Eliot to follow._

**“** _It's Eliot.”_

_“No bullshit, c'mon.”_

_“Fifty years," Eliot tries, swallowing anxiously. His heart beats in terror, a quick, wretched heartbeat. Know me, his heart begs. Remember me. "Who gets proof of concept like that?”_

_“What?”_

_“Peaches and plums, motherfucker. I'm alive in here.”_

_Quentin's eyes are wide. “Eliot.”_

(A clearing before a small house, the roads lead here. The king stands in the center of an incomplete mosaic; where the last piece belongs, there is another page instead.)

_Forty-one (a life not quite lived)._

_  
“Do you think of them? Our friends?”_

_“You’ve asked me this before.”_

_“I know.”_

_“Sometimes,” Quentin says, the starlight bright on the silver in his hair. “I wouldn’t trade this though, El.”_

_“This,” Eliot murmurs, his voice half-lost to the night._

_“Spending a life with you.” When Eliot takes Quentin to bed that evening, he makes love to him with the window open and the smell of peaches in the air._

(In the distant dark, floating in the starless night, Eliot hears only an echo of his own voice from somewhere long ago and far away. _“What the hell is wrong with you? Someone good and true loves you, and he went out on a limb, and yeah, it was a little crazy, but you knew. You knew this was a moment that truly mattered and you just snuffed it out. Q, I'm sorry. I was afraid, and when I'm afraid, I run away. If I ever get out of here, Q, know that when I'm braver it's because I learned it from you.”_ ) 

* * *

Do you believe in magic?

Do you remember the beginning? Do you remember the Garden when we were nothing but spit and clay? You held your lips to mine and breathed out, filling my lungs for the first time. Here we are, look around you. Look at the carpet of moss beneath our feet, the lichen growing upon our skin, the ivy around our arms. Look at the sun, still coming out for us, no matter how we’ve fallen. No matter what we’ve done. 

Did we get it wrong again? Did we fuck it up again?

Come, once again then. In another lifetime.

It’s not over quite yet.

  
  


* * *

  
  


He opens his eyes. The popcorn ceiling again.

Quentin is frowning, worry bubbling in his eyes. “Did it - “

“Peaches and plums, motherfucker,” Eliot whispers, flat on his back.

“Eliot, _fuck_ , are you - “

Eliot might call his name but he doesn’t. Eliot might explain but he doesn’t. Eliot might sob but he doesn’t. He shifts from where he lays sprawled on the floor and comes to stand before Quentin, looking down into those wide, nervous brown eyes. With both hands on either side of Quentin’s face, careful not to bruise,he kisses the one he loves at long last. 

It tastes sweet; he had known it would.

* * *

“You look like an angel,” Quentin murmurs. His hand brushes over the planes of Eliot’s face, finding where the moonlight has pooled. They lay in Eliot's bed, chests pressed together and hands entwined, kissing over and over and over again.

“Fallen, maybe.”

“Well, Lucifer was supposed to be the most beautiful.”

Eliot flushes. Quentin rubs his hands against Eliot’s chest, his lips covering Eliot’s own. In one moment, he smells both the shampoo and the heady fresh sweat on Quentin’s neck. Quentin moves to kiss along his ear, his jawline, his clavicles. 

“I want you,” Eliot breathes. His hands move of their own accord to that slim waist. He tries to pull him in closer and his knee slips between Quentin’s legs. 

“Fuck, god, El,” Quentin says, his mouth on Eliot’s temple, “I thought you were dead. When we banished the monster, I thought you were - " Quentin shudders against him. “I need you.” He wraps strong fingers around Eliot’s bicep, his dark eyes staring into Eliot’s own. His hands are firm, rigid, as if he is trying to hold Eliot in place. _Do not go far off._ As if he is trying to memorize this moment, commit it internally.

“El - “ Quentin cries out. Eliot wraps his hand around the root of him, feeling Quentin hot and pulsing beneath his own skin. He feels the same, like an extension of Eliot’s own body. Why do you feel the same? Why does it feel like you’re the same, that this skin and bone belong to the same heart? Why can’t I tell the difference between me and you save for the interruption of air? Maybe it’s the weed, maybe it’s the wine. (There’s always something to blame.) 

_I love you._ Love. To be loved is out of his control; Eliot breathes heavily under the weight of it. There was a world that crept in sometimes, between waking and sleeping. Remember the bright sky, the thick forest. Remember the spires and towers of the castle, the crunch of the stones beneath your boot. The sound of the brook and the birdsong. He had loved Fillory once. And love is a story, love is timeless, love does not end. Is this a story where love only flows in one direction? Is this a story where time can’t move both ways? He is in love. What does that mean? Look at this useless word, too big to say anything at all. Love is a Rosetta Stone, explaining our own past and the future. He loves and through it, he sees something in himself all along.

“Q,” he murmurs. 

“Yeah?”

Eliot swallows. It’s there, isn’t it? Stuck like a pill. Like a chickenbone in the back of his throat. He’ll choke. His throat will close up around it, killing him slowly. He says Quentin’s name and it means _I’m sorry._ He says the name and it means _I shouldn’t have slipped._ Quentin reaches for him in the dark. His fingers curl tightly around Eliot’s hand, like an apostrophe claims a word.

They lay in the dark, breathing hard, sweat drying on their bodies. Eliot tightens his grip on Quentin’s hand, afraid to let it go. If he lets go, if he lets it slip away, will he ever find it again?

“When I first learned about magic, I thought I could save the world,” Quentin whispers.

“So did I.”

“Why did we think we were different? No one has - it’s always the same, no matter what.”

Eliot draws circles in the sheets with a lazy finger. Why do we imagine the rules are different for us? That we alone are exceptional and we alone have the keys to the kingdom. _I will deliver you,_ we want to say, firm in our conviction. _If you follow me._

Perhaps that was the first mistake.

“It feels like the world’s on fire.”

“I think,” Eliot says, “That it’s always felt that way.”

Quentin gives him an odd look. “You might be right.”

“How many lifetimes did you say?”

“Forty.”

Eliot swallows. “Well, that’s a bit off.”

“How off?”

“Guess.”

“…Fifty.”

“Higher.”

“A hundred.”

“Higher.”

“What the actual fuck, El?”

Eliot shakes his head, his dark hair splaying across the pillow. When he rolls over on his side, looking down at Quentin, he’s laughing, lost in a myriad of memories. They might be his, they might not be. He’ll never know. It doesn’t matter, these thousands of lifetimes of love.

“Q,” he murmurs, leaning in to kiss him. Pale sheets and pale skin, Quentin’s mouth on his, swallowing the ache. Where has the light gone? Does it matter when the moon is bright? Who has been resurrected, he or Lazarus? Does it matter? “Kiss me again.”

Quentin does. Here he is again, stumbling over messy sheets and pulling Quentin on top of him. Like a ship against whitewater, Quentin bucks atop him, bending backward. Eliot runs a hand along that beautiful stretch of his back, counting the staccato rhythm of his spine. He kisses Quentin and they shatter apart here in this soft bed. 

It feels a little bit like magic.

* * *

_Fifty-seven._

_Look back._

_There in the dust and the dirt, the screech of swords and shields around them. A man fallen, crouching and clutching his side. Sweat dripped from his body, mixing with the dust and blood. He smelled like metal. He smelled like gunfire (though they did not know of that, not yet). His companion tore the linens from his own chest and pressed them to the wound, till the fabric grew red with his lover._

_When he stopped breathing, Achilles shot an arrow at the sky. When he stopped breathing, Achilles dragged Hector around the city, tied and ruined behind his brutal chariot._

_Here lies Hector, breaker of horses._ _Here lies Patroclus, light of the world._

_That was a long time ago._

_One-thousand and eighty-six._

_Alexander pulled him to his tent and pressed the thick, dark wine to his lips. “Drink up,” Alexander whispered, his bright eyes shining under a Greek sky, “We’ve got all night."_

_Six-thousand two-hundred and seven._

_Under a dark, northern sky, two men fumble in a ship’s cabin, laying each other across a narrow bunk. “Kiss me,” one says. And so he kisses the commander, running his hair through the dark curls, carefully unbuttoning the gold epaulets from the naval greatcoat. They must be quiet or they'll be lashed. But here, abandoned in the cold, with only the dog watch awake above, they might borrow a little warmth for the night._

_Nine-thousand._

_A man’s hand in his own. The lights turned low, the blanket pulled up to his chin. Outside, the shine of streetlights and the sound of the city. Here, in a room somewhere in the Chelsea Hotel, he finds love and holds on tight. “If we find each other again - “_

_“Yes,” he says. “I’ll love you again.”_

_In every lifetime, in every shape and form. For you are the last piece of the puzzle._

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
